Jordan Thistlewood, Senior Product Manager, Foundry

Re-engineered Geolib engine

Katana's scene graph processing engine has been re-engineered to deliver substantial gains in performance and interactivity. With intelligent data reuse, and the processing of scene graph data moved to a separate thread from the UI, Katana 2.0 offers a more responsive and satisfying look-dev and lighting experience.

Graph State Variables

With new Graph State Variables, you can control which nodes contribute to scene graph processing at a particular time. This can greatly simplify workflows where you might want to reuse node setups with different inputs or outputs. In this way, you can even set up a single Katana project to control the lighting for a whole sequence.

Gaffer Three

Gaffer Three is the latest incarnation of Katana's lighting control panel. With the new system, you can use additional Gaffer Three nodes to nondestructively edit upstream lighting, fine-tuning parameters for a particular shot while continuing to reflect overall changes made at a higher level.

High-efficiency collaborative workflows

Katana’s new approach to look development and lighting hinges on collaboration and reuse. By using the node graph, you automatically record your steps as you work, creating sharable, resuable recipes. And with Live Groups, you can group and publish parts of the node graph, then reuse, share, version and update them across a project.

Rules-based operations

With Katana's Collections, you can categorize items either by manually selecting them, or more powerfully by using Collection Expression Language (CEL) to create rules based on naming, metadata or other attributes. With rule-based collections, upstream content can change radically without breaking your template.

Deferred loading and processing

Fed up of waiting for scenes to load? Thanks to Katana's deferred rendering and processing, even super-large scenes load at lightning speeds, so you can make changes right away; each part of the scene is only processed when you need to access it, so the UI remains responsive.